.............................................

Steve knew the guy Jean Williston had been dating before he started dating her himself, and it probably said something unintentional about him, he reflected wryly, that he could never make up his mind if the guy was gay. For that matter, he kept on dating her even after she explained on an early date that things weren’t likely to get physical between them. “Why not?” he asked her, in a tone that was mainly teasing.

“Because I don’t want to kiss you.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you might have AIDS.”

“You don’t get AIDS from kissing.”

“Maybe that’s what some people say. But I’m not a hundred percent sure of that. I don’t want to take that kind of risk if I’m not a hundred percent sure.” Well, he’d met her in church. And while as far as he knew he wasn’t gay himself, he would certainly admit to being burned out, at least right then, by the whole rat race of mendacity that dating involved, and if nothing else, Jean was honest.

If this was the deal, Steve took it. He’d dated a series of women in the conventional way, and each time there’d be a surprise: a husband would turn up, or a problem with alcohol, or cocaine, or both. By then he’d be involved enough sexually that getting out was a struggle. He wouldn’t have that sort of problem with Jean, and the deal was going to be temporary. And of course, he’d met her in church.

He knew already, through the process of church-osmosis by which one learns these things, that she was actually widowed, though still fairly young. Her husband had passed away, also young, from a heart attack. Steve started going out with her, she filled in other details: they’d been on separate vacations, and he’d expired while on the toilet in a Paris hotel room.

A librarian by profession, he’d accumulated, by the time of his death – she mentioned this in the most offhand manner – a significant collection of pornography. Her tone suggested it was the sort of significant a librarian would call significant. Steve wondered if that meant something like pre-Columbian mesoamerican pornography, or something a non-librarian might like as well. She didn’t explain, and he decided not to pry.

She taught school. Even though it was the fourth grade, she had advanced degrees, and the school district, which was in an affluent town, had designated her a Master Teacher, so she was well paid. And this was fortunate, since as she explained to him, she went to see a psychiatrist four afternoons a week, after school. “Health plans don’t cover that kind of thing anymore, do they?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I pay it all myself.”

Which probably explained why, even in a community that was well-off, her apartment was located directly under some power lines, which buzzed and crackled. Steve was mildly curious about what might have prompted her to visit a psychiatrist four days a week, but he decided he’d hold off, at least for the time being. Still, he reflected, this was by no means the first woman he’d dated who’d been in therapy. And therapy always seemed to be as much an excuse for the status quo as a way out of it: in the face of even mild remonstrances over issues like forgotten dates, the women would always reply something like “I’m in therapy, I can’t make any changes.”

They talked about Alan Edwards, the guy she’d dated before Steve came along. “He doesn’t have a car,” she said. “I wound up doing chauffeur duty. I drove him everywhere.”

“Does he have a job?” Steve asked.

“He never made that clear, whether he had one or not. But honestly, I don’t think he has two pennies to rub together.” Alan was the sort of person who hangs around churches.

But Jean’s acerbic remarks weren’t limited to Alan. She was, it soon became apparent, talking about Steve to her psychiatrist. “He thinks you’re after my money,” she said.

“What money?” he almost blurted, but he caught himself. While well paid for a teacher, such money as she had was clearly going to the shrink. But of course, he reflected after a few days, patients like Jean were getting harder to find, and should Steve gain influence over how she spent her money – by marrying her, was the only way he figured that could happen – he might affect those payments for four visits per week. But he had no intention of marrying her, and in any case, getting married was the sort of change you shouldn’t be making while in therapy. But she was letting him know clearly enough what she thought of him: he might be carrying AIDS, and he was likely a gold digger.

She spoke of other encounters: each Saturday morning, she got together with a group of friends for coffee at a local restaurant. That day, however, she’d had to get up and leave, deeply offended. “Body parts,” she said. “They were talking about body parts.” This, Steve thought, from a woman who, by her own account, had lived chock-a-block with a significant pornography collection. It was almost entertaining, except he was beginning to see why she might see the need to visit a psychiatrist.

One evening he turned up for their date driving a loaner from the body shop. He’d had a fender-bender with a guy coming in the opposite direction who’d turned left right in front of him. When Jean heard the story, she shook her head. “Tell me this,” she said. “Had you had anything to drink?”

“I don’t think you understand. The other guy turned left right in front of me. If anyone had been drinking, it was him.” But Jean nodded her head in an almost maternal, skeptical way. Not only was Steve carrying AIDS, not only was he after her money, but he was a dangerous drunk on the road.

Even so, she was beginning to invite him in for a glass of wine after their dates. Why not? After all, she’d made it clear that any advances would not be welcome. And while she clearly couldn’t afford great wine, the wine she bought was adequate, and she didn’t stint with it. At the same time, he was becoming familiar with her apartment. It was a two-bedroom. One bedroom was hers, of course. The door to the other was always shut. Apparently it had belonged to her late husband – or at least the husband’s things were in there. Maybe the porno collection was still there. She’d mentioned it – would she ever show it to him? But for the whole time he dated her, the door was never opened.

But the night he showed up driving the loaner, they’d already had several glasses of wine at her place. “Why don’t you just buy a new car?” she asked him. “The one you have is, well. . .” There was nothing all that wrong with his car. It was fairly new, still with payments on it, and it hadn’t been the cheapest in the line. It just wasn’t a BMW, apparently. And her car – that was one of the things she’d deferred to pay the shrink.

He was starting to get fed up with her. They were sitting together on her couch, sipping from the glasses of wine on her coffee table. He lost patience: he reached over, pulled her to him, and kissed her. Something in him said if he did that, she’d push him away, scream or whatever, and throw him out. That would be the end of it. He was getting tired of her put-downs. So not only did he kiss her, he French kissed her. She didn’t want to exchange body fluids: this would be an exchange of body fluids, in whatever small way. She’d go bananas.

Except, he suddenly realized, she was OK with that. She was perfectly OK with being French kissed. He kissed her again, and she was still OK with it. He was simply astonished. He reached up and cupped his hand over a breast – a body part. She was OK with that, too. He decided he’d pushed his luck far enough. Not long afterward, he said good night and left. He couldn’t imagine what she’d say to the shrink that Monday.

On their date the following week, it appeared that canoodling on the couch had been added to the regular agenda, and the possibility that he might be carrying AIDS had been tacitly dropped from her list of grievances against him, although the others, as far as he could see, remained fully in force. But the whole thing still seemed a little too easy, a little like one of those old films where the couple squabbles until the hero gives the heroine a good, hard kiss, and after that everything works out. He’d lived long enough to know that the psyche is a good deal more devious than that.

A week or so later, he went a little farther with her on the couch: he slipped his hand under her sweater and put it inside her bra. Her reaction there was as surprising as the one to his kissing her had been. She stood up, took his hand, and led him into her bedroom. She gestured for him to lie down on the bed. Then she lay down next to him, both of them still fully clothed. She lay on her stomach, with her arms pulled up under her chest, and showed no inclination to move at all after that.

Somehow the one thing that caught his eye was her alarm clock on the night table. There was nothing at all special about it: it was set for the usual bourgeois early morning wake-up, and it was a mass-produced sibling of the same alarm clock Steve had on his own night table. Yet its ordinariness was somehow dispiriting. Watched over by the alarm, she lay motionless in a position that didn’t offer much opening for sex. The most he could think to offer was a back rub, a highly overrated erotic move. They would have been better off, he thought, staying on the couch. After a while, he simply said good night, got up, and left.

Things didn’t come to him in a flash. It happened over several days, but he kept turning the circumstances over in his mind: the separate vacations, the psychiatrist, the fear of AIDS, the permanently shut bedroom door: Jean’s husband, he finally decided, had been gay. The pornography collection had been gay porn. The therapy had to do with why she’d married a gay guy. He figured he probably had things right, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it.

He went out with her again the following week. When the time came for a little action on the couch, she did the same thing she’d done earlier: she took him into the bedroom, but this time she stopped and took off her dress. She posed briefly in her slip, but then put on a robe. In the robe she was, if anything, more demure than she’d been in her dress, especially since she still had everything on underneath. He wondered if the whole reason for the robe was to keep from wrinkling her dress. Then she lay down on the bed in the same posture she had the week before, prone, rigid, arms drawn up under her chest, the alarm still watching over the whole scene.

After a while, he said good night again, got up, and left. Anything that might be done to salvage the situation, he decided, would be a long, unpleasant struggle. And she already had a therapist; he’d be flattering himself to think he could do anything to help that wasn’t already being done. And he was sure that, at a certain level, she thought that if he fell for the bedroom bait-and-switch, he was stupid.

Still, he felt bad. He didn’t call her that week, but he did the next. “It’s you,” she said. “I thought it was all over between us – shouldn’t it be?”

“I guess it should.”

“You’re right,” she said, and hung up the phone.